Artificial Intelligence creates never-ending death metal

Who wouldn't want 24/7 AI-generated death metal pumped into their ears?!

Published: April 27, 2019 at 7:00 am

If you can’t get enough of death metal (I mean who doesn't!), you’re in luck: the YouTube channel Dadabots generates a livestream of brand-new death metal music 24/7 using artificial intelligence.

The stream, created by music technologists CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, has been running non-stop since 24 March. In that time, it has been continuously creating new music in a death metal style without any human input.

Death metal can be something of an acquired taste, being at the more extreme end of the heavy metal spectrum. Personally, it's not something I particularly enjoyed listening to, being more of a classical music girl myself, but our resident metal head described it as "surprisingly solid". We'll let you make you own decisions.

The stream uses an artificial intelligence system called a neural network. By feeding existing death metal music into the neural network, Carr and Zukowski ‘trained’ the bot to compose new music in the same style.

The network spots patterns in the music to identify the characteristic features of the genre, and then recreates those features to create the new music.

The artificial music doesn’t sound quite human: the neural network isn’t limited by having to breathe or by how fast it can play notes on the guitar.

For more curated content, Carr and Zukowski have also trained the neural network to generate albums in the style of specific bands by feeding in an individual album, which are available on their website.

The livestream is based on the music of the Canadian technical metal band ARCHSPIRE.

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